Parkinson’s disease (PD) is traditionally associated with motor symptoms. However, impairments in language functioning may also accompany this disorder. The present study investigated pragmatic language deficits in PD and their relationship to cognitive functioning. Forty patients with PD were compared to ageand IQ-matched controls on measures of pragmatic language functioning using the Test of...

We present a model of pragmatic referring expression interpretation in a grounded communication task (identifying colors from descriptions) that draws upon predictions from two recurrent neural network classifiers, a speaker and a listener, unified by a recursive pragmatic reasoning framework. Experiments show that this combined pragmatic model interprets color descriptions more accurately than...

The reductionist/holist debate seems an impoverished one, with many participants appearing to adopt a position first and constructing rationalisations second. Here I propose an intermediate position of pragmatic holism, that irrespective of whether all natural systems are theoretically reducible, for many systems it is completely impractical to attempt such a reduction, also that regardless if ...

A century ago, Peirce developed a pragmatic theory of meaning. The theory appeals to the Pragmatic Maxim. It says that the meaning of a concept is the sum total of its implications for possible observations and actions. The Relevance Theory of Sperber & Wilson is classified according to that criteria to the category of pragmatic theories of meaning. It is argued that relevance is an instance of...

This paper investigates semantic and pragmatic presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) and enhances the pragmatic perspective of presupposition in DRT. In doing so, it draws attention to the need to account for agent presupposition (i.e. both speaker and hearer presupposition) when dealing with pragmatic presupposition. Furthermore, this paper links this pragmatic conception of ...

In this synchronic study, I shall adopt a corpus-based approach to investigate the semantic change of V-diao in Mandarin. Semantically, V-diao constructions fall into three categories: A) Physical disappearance from its original position, with the V slot filled by physical verbs, such as tao-diao “escape,” diu-diao “throw away,” and so on. B) Disappearance from a certain conceptual domain, rath...